Medical and social implications of alcohol use among adult women in a rural area of Ranchi, Jharkhand: A cross-sectional study

Introduction: The harmful use of alcohol is increasing at a huge pace leading to the occurrence of multiple diseases and has become a leading risk factor for global burden of diseases.

Aims and objectives: The aim of this study is to assess the health profile of adult women and to find out the medical and social effects of alcohol consumption.

Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted in the rural field practice area, Ormanjhi of RIMS, Ranchi, for a duration of 27 months (September 2016 to November 2018) among 336 women by multistage random sampling. A pretested semi-structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Templates were generated in MS Excel sheet and analysis of data was done using SPSS software (20.0).

Results: The mean BMI of the study subjects was 21.62 ± 3.33 kg/m². Anaemia was present in 42.6% of the women, 10.4% women were hypertensive and 9.2% were suffering from diabetes. The association between alcohol consumption and occurrence of co-morbidities was found insignificant. The social effects of alcoholism varied ranging from going into debts seen in 35.42% of the women; 62.5% of the women were criticised about their drinking habit by relatives or children. About 9.5% of the women were found to consume alcohol during their last pregnancy, and among women who were on regular intake of alcohol even during pregnancy, majority (65.62%) of them delivered by normal vaginal delivery.

Conclusion: Alcohol consumption among females caused several adverse social consequences without any significant effect on health.